Crises

We have a cost of living crisis in New Zealand.

Basic foodstuffs, housing, fuel etc are getting beyond the reach of the low waged, whose numbers and levels of desperation are increasing. 

We have a deepening political divide.

There is a growing impatience among a wide range of working class people with what is perceived to be an affluent, urban, liberal elite mainly employed in well paid, white collar, government or corporate jobs, who are investing energy and political capital in what are seen by many people as fringe issues. 

We have trade unions seemingly more concerned with being the C21st equivalent of politically correct than addressing the causes of their loss of influence and relevance, and with that, their ability to protect their members’ foundational employment rights. 

We have a growing health crisis in New Zealand. 

If you’re poor in NZ, your chances of dying earlier/unnecessarily are far higher than if you are affluent, and that’s getting worse. 

There are massive waiting lists in public hospitals for treatments of all sorts. Where I live, if you need an urgent ENT appointment it could be several weeks before you get one. If you need a hip replacement, unless you have insurance/can pay privately, you could wait in extreme pain and with limited mobility for years. If you are a menopausal woman and need to see an endocrinologist – even privately – there's no chance. 

Doctors use chemical cudgels and blasts of radiation to treat some cancers wherein the side-effects of the treatment are often worse than the disease, and even getting timely access to that is now a postcode lottery. 

Emergency departments in cash-strapped public hospitals are struggling to deal with those who are being failed by largely privately owned primary health provision.This week, in Auckland, a woman died of a brain haemorrhage because triaging failed in an over-stretched emergency department. A couple of years ago, a man dying from liver failure was dumped at a bus stop by hospital staff in Christchurch.

We are lagging behind the rest of the OECD in lots of areas while doctors in private practice are coining it.

Globally, there is a widespread capitulation to forms of unnecessary medicalisation, eg, to enable a transwoman to experience breast feeding, doctors prescribed a drug which is contraindicated for pregnant and breastfeeding women because of possible adverse effects on the foetus/newborn. 

Clinics in the USA provide so-called sex nullification surgery or other forms of appearance-altering procedures to bring the body into some sort of approximation to a person's sense of self as being of the other sex, of no sex, or of another species.

Lupron, a cancer drug, is used off-label to treat central precocious puberty (CPP) because it delays sexual maturation. Despite evidence of longterm harm from that use, for the past decade or so, it has been used off-label, to suppress puberty in kids who believe they are transgender.

This is part of a much wider and deeper social/political malaise which is building to a crisis point, but the actual numbers of transgender kids affected by the so-called, Dutch Protocol, at the moment is very small.  

Far greater numbers of children are affected by a global explosion in developmental and reproductive disorders and childhood cancers. Alongside a global drop in sperm quality over the past 50 years, there has been an increase in CPP which studies have linked to endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment, especially in agriculture/horticulture. 

We live in a chemical soup, and immature bodies are more powerfully affected by that than mature ones. To add to this environmental chemical cocktail, powerful drugs, used off-label and with as yet inadequate evidence as to their long term adverse side-effects, is something that needs to be approached with the greatest possible caution. 

No one, and especially children, should be exposed to massively invasive and lifelong medicalisation unless it's absolutely essential. 

Trans-ideologues and activists have played a huge role in persuading/enabling/ forcing medical professionals to reach for these off-label drugs and the scalpel to treat what is, objectively, a suddenly emergent, and rapidly growing epidemic of sex-related unease and anxiety among kids and adolescents, which manifests especially among girls, many of whom have pre-existing co-morbidities. 

The big issue with this for me remains – kids who go on the trans-medical track, way more often than not, stay on it, which means being exposed to:

the as yet unknown long-term adverse effects of puberty suppression, followed by

the forcing of a counter-puberty with synthetic cross-sex hormones, followed by

the very high probability of multiple surgeries to remove pre-pubescent primary reproductive organs, and to refashion genitalia, followed by,

a lifetime of medical treatment (ongoing cross-sex hormones and testing for metabolic organ and cardio-vascular health) and the accompanying state and/or corporate surveillance. 

The well-documented adverse effects on sexual pleasure aside, because immature gonads will not produce viable gametes, most of these kids will be rendered sterile.

That’s a massive price tag which MAY be reasonable in some instances but there are some spectacular twists and leaps in logic and ethics needed to justify in all cases.